After my move to DotNetNuke Corp. I felt the need to make some modifications to my blog site. Having used the original DotNetNuke 4 MinimalExtropy site for quite some time, it was the right moment to move on in this respect as well.

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Today marks a big change for me. As of today I will be working for DotNetNuke Corporation. There, I’ve said it!

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting for me. Last January I was approached by DotNetNuke Corporation with the question whether or not I was interested in becoming part of a new European office, to be established in Amsterdam. I would be wearing multiple hats: helping out with both support and sales, and also doing evangelism.

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Windows 2008r2 is good in so many ways, I can never list them all. Of course, being the server variant of Windows 7, it means you can use all the nice interface enhancements that are also available in Windows 7.

Both Windows 7 and Windows 2008r2 have IIS 7.5 on board. One of the most interesting enhancements in IIS 7.5 is something called the Application Pool Identity (AppPoolIdentity). In Windows 2008r2 this is the default setting for new application pools. With this setting, IIS can create a unique virtual windows account, using the name of the application pool. Accounts created like this have the same networking capabilities as the well known NETWORKSERVICE account, however, because they are unique, they can also be used to secure physical files in your system.

So, lets see how we can use this to quickly install DotNetNuke in a secure manner.

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In order to prepare for an upcoming move of all sites hosted on our webservers to a new location, one of the tasks was to list which sites are served by IIS, including all hostheaders defined for those sites. The purpose of this list is to identify all domains we are handling.

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One of the hidden gems in DotNetNuke 5.0 is the new caching support in the CBO (Custom Business Objects) class. During the refactoring of DotNetNuke for the Cambrian release, caching was one of the things that was closely looked at, since caching was starting to cause major issues in the DNN 4.x branch.

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Every once and a while you probably find yourself needing to create an overview of DNN users and some of their profile properties. For instance when your client wants to have that data in an excel spreadsheet….

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Right after I posted the blog about a tool I found to clear the Recent Projects list in Visual Studio, Maarten van Stam pointed me to a much better tool than that, MRU Cleaner from Bob DeRosa.

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Always when doing visual studio demo’s, I am having issues with a long list of previously opened projects. Not that I mind anyone seeing what projects i am involved with, but the screen gets cluttered, and its a lot harder to pick the right project for your demo.

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Today I released my first DNN 5 module (more about that here). It’s taken me on and off about a week to get the module properly packaged. Partly because of lack of documentation about the new extension manifest. So here are the things i found out during the packaging process… hope someone else is helped by this info as well.

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When you need to upgrade multiple DotNetNuke websites it is sometimes hard to figure out what version a specific site is. Of course, you could logon to all your sites, but that takes quite some time. If you have installed the databases of your sites in one sql server instance, there is another option available. You could open all databases, open the Version table, and check the highest version number in that table. This is still a lot of work though… however, it is something that can be automated with a little effort.

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DNN 5 now has the option to give non admins access to admin modules. You can just put any admin module on a new page and give users access to that. An even easier thing to do is to just give non admins permissions to use a specific admin page.

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Yesterday I spent the better part of the day deleting portals from a larger DNN installation, for the purpose of creating a smaller copy of the same installation with a subset of portals. This post is meant to be a note to self to look into multi portal deletion sometime, and to remind me of a script that needs to run to clear out data for a few specific modules...

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Last week I was asked to come up with a way to use the Page Icon in DotNetNuke as a source for a multi lingual enabled image on a page. Although this could have been done by creating a skinobject, I decided to pull this one off by creating an "inline" skinobject.. by lack of a better term.

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Just recently i answered a question on the DotNetNuke forums about re installing the Search Results module. This is somewhat tricky as you cannot do it by hand.. it can only be done by sql script

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Where it comes to using SQL Server features, I am a very late adopter. Not by choice, for all the DotNetNuke modules I create, I'd like to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, especially since DotNetNuke also fully supports MS SQL Server 2000.

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